Archive for November 6th, 2008

I am annoyed. I am not furious, nor outraged, nor fanatical, but annoyed. And disappointed. Last night my company car was broken into and my G.P.S. device stolen, along with the car-charger I recently bought for it.

Nothing else was taken.

Ostensibly, this is a crime of mere selfishness. Someone or someones wanted my GPS, so they stole it. But let us examine this crime more closely. What do we know about the criminal? Very little. My car was parked in the Westport section of Kansas City, certainly not a wealthy neighborhood, but not a crime syndicate either. Regardless, I am uninterested in the socio-economic status of my unseen fiend, so I will move on to more pressing matters to me.

I very much liked my GPS. It was extremely useful for finding places and searching for restaurants, hotels, bars, movie theaters, bowling alleys and the like for a given place. The thief must have liked my GPS nearly as much, either for its noted uses or for its obvious monetary value. So, fine, that is a wash. I have a GPS, he wants one. He steals it. (I am calling the thief a HE for ease, but it could also just as easily have been some dumb bitch. If you think this a more likely scenario, please mentally insert SHE each time I write HE in reference to the thief) But it was raining last night. Raining hard. And what I would like to know is what kind of person breaks the driver’s side front window to break in? I have Kansas license plates, so he KNOWS I am at least 20 minutes from home, knows that I will have to drive back home with rain pouring not merely into my car, but ONTO me as I drive (not to mention the little glass bits that fell as I drove). The car has no fewer than 5 other windows to choose from. Now, excepting the front and back windshields – which would be equally, if not more inconsiderate – that leaves 3 perfectly good windows to smash. Why not the back-side passenger window? If I ever break into a car, this will be my window of choice. It provides that up to 3 people may have to still use the vehicle, and it defers to the driver. Since all cars have automatic locks, our man could have easily unlocked the doors, walked back to the driver’s side door and gained immediate access. In fact, since there was just me using the car, I would have abided 2 shattered windows – say, both passenger side windows – in exchange for the hassle of having to clean off the glass from my own seat. It was uncomfortable and I did NOT appreciate it. My thief was completely inconsiderate. What an asshole.

As I said, only the GPS was stolen. This is quite telling. In my car, I had 2 separate CD cases. One of these, the smaller of the two, contained 15 CDs by Tom Waits, an unexpected gold-mine for the casual son-of-a-bitch burglar-type. Untouched. Unacceptable. The hours he could have spent basking in Mr. Waits – decades of music! Masterpiece after masterpiece! The larger CD case contained numerous CDs from various artists. It looked like he may have thumbed through it but wasn’t interested. Apparently, the full canons of Aimee Mann and The Decemberists didn’t fit in with his devil-may-care window smashing lifestyle. There was also some Ben Folds, and the “Once” soundtrack, and if that didn’t interest him, then I don’t have a thing to say to him. It seems that inconsideration and poor musical taste go hand in hand.

Finally, the thief’s actions showed a blatant disinterest for his own career as a low-life prick. Complete tunnel-vision. That he left the CDs was, I must assume, a product of his poor musical upbringing, and his parents must bear that shame. That he left the car itself is understandable, as it is a company vehicle and would be easily traceable (his first and last intelligent decision) A GPS is no ordinary item. It is not a watch, it is not a TV. A watch tells the time, and a TV – provided there is also TiVo – gives insight into what a person watches. But a GPS will tell you precisely where the person you stole it from LIVES. They all have a simple button labeled “HOME” which immediately navigates a person to this pre-set location. My thief, knowing that I was not in my car, knowing that he had the jump on me, missed a golden opportunity to really stick it to me. The press of a button and one more broken window, and into my home he could have gone. He could have had my TV, computers, film camera… not to mention my vast collection of DVDs and books! Perhaps he could have swiped Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (for more of my literary favorites, check out my LITERATURE page). He could have stolen my Quentin Tarantino DVDs and laughed to himself at this irony, while telling himself he stole them mostly for the dialogue. A world of art and knowledge at his fingertips, and he blew it. I had this thought driving home, rain spitting at me, dribblets of glass toppling into my lap as Jay-Z told me to “go on brush your shoulder off” (if he only knew). So I sped up, hoping to catch this dipshit in the act and kick ass the Insurance way – with a shingle gauge and a carpet knife. But my hopes were dashed when I found no signs of forced entry or even possible interest at my apartment; only the same stained apathy that always resides here. What a miserable thief he turned out to be. Someone ought to smack some sense into him.

In other news, I did some great networking at the IFC group and got two business cards. Not a bad night, all told.